The Worlds Best Poetry, Volume 10 | Page 4

shut against him! His means are the commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms.
"It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself.... Impelled by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he struggles forward into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now pronounced imperishable."
But why should one read poetry, at all, where there is so much good prose to be read? Herbert Spencer in his essay on "Style" gives some reasons for the superiority of poetry to prose. He says:
"Poetry, we shall find, habitually adopts those symbols of thought and those methods of using them which instinct and analysis agree in choosing, as most effective, and becomes poetry by virtue of doing this.
"Thus, poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive, partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical composer catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and sympathy, grief and despair, vent themselves, and out of these germs evolves melodies suggesting higher phases of these feelings; so the poet develops from the typical expressions in which men utter passion and sentiments those choice forms of verbal combination in which concentrated passion and sentiment may be fitly presented."
And the language which Spencer regards as the "most effective" is tersely set forth by that poetic and spiritual preacher, Frederick W. Robertson, in his idea of poetry: "The natural language of excited feeling, and a work of imagination wrought into form by art."
Another point in connection with the language of poetry is that, compelled by their limitations of rhythm, rhyme, and the compression of much thought and feeling into brief space, the poets have become the finest artists in the use of words. The examples of word-use in the dictionaries are largely drawn from the poets. Joseph Joubert, the French epigrammatist, says:
"Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of flowers, or like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet has a breath that fills out words, gives them light and color. He knows wherein consists their charm, and by what art enchanted structures may be built with them."
Familiarity with poetry thus becomes to the attentive reader an insensible training in language, as well as an elevation of mind and spirit. Superiority of spirit and of form, then, offers good reasons why the intelligent--whether for stimulation, consolation, self-culture, or mere amusement in idle hours--should avail of a due proportion of this finest expression of the sweetest, the highest, and the deepest emotional experiences of life, in the realms of nature, of art, and of humanity itself.
A few words from the gifted William Ellery Channing the elder epitomize some striking thoughts on this subject:
"We believe that poetry, far from injuring society, is one of the great instruments of its refinement and exaltation. It lifts the mind above ordinary life, gives it a respite from depressing cares, and awakens the consciousness of its affinity with what is pure and noble. In its legitimate and highest efforts it has the same tendency and aim with Christianity,--that is, to spiritualize our nature.... The present life, which is the first stage of the immortal mind, abounds in the materials of poetry, and it is the highest office of the bard, to detect this divine element among the grosser pleasures and labors of our earthly being. The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise, tame, and finite. To the gifted eye it abounds in the poetic....
"It is not true that the poet paints a life which does not exist. He only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys: and in this he does well; for it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratifications, but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher being."
In his Introduction to the "Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes"--the pioneer book of all such aids to church congregational singing--Henry Ward Beecher gave a noble view of the power of a hymn arising out of experience:
"No other composition is like an experimental hymn. It is not a mere poetic impulse. It is not a thought, a fancy, a feeling